This week, my patient requested a specific procedure. We agreed it should be done, and to demonstrate what would happen to him, I fired up my iPad in the office and showed him a two-minute video of the procedure I created and uploaded to YouTube using free software on my computer.

He was crystal clear on the procedure and prepared for what will happen in a few weeks.

Do you think it builds trust to see a video of the exact procedure you’re about to have while you’re sitting in the exam room with your surgeon? Definitely.

YouTube sends my practice website a large percentage of my best monthly traffic. Last month, the visitors from my YouTube channel stayed on my website longer than most people, and viewed more pages than average.

This makes sense: A person who watches one of my videos is already interested in my information and wants to know more — before they arrive on my website.

If you want to be found by patients, you need to be on YouTube before your local competition figures this out. A YouTube channel is like a mini-website on YouTube where visitors can see all your videos.

Here are six components of a successful YouTube channel for your practice.

1. Your own website

Whether you use your practice’s website or a personal site, each video you produce should link back to that location. You can connect videos to your website in many ways:
• In the description section of each video
• On the Channel page, where visitors can pick from all your videos
• In the introduction and throughout the video itself
• By embedding your videos on your own website

2. A profile picture

A professional-looking profile image is reassuring to visitors that the channel is maintained and created by a real person. Most people are suspicious of a doctor who claims to be an expert but doesn’t show what he or she looks like.

Even most iPhone and smartphone cameras take high-resolution pictures. You can spend as much or as little as you want to do this.

I recommend physicians use the same picture across all online media: Facebook, Twitter, website, YouTube, etc.

Most search engine experts believe this may have implications for how Google ranks your pages. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Google can recognize a profile picture across your “web properties.” More consistency likely leads to higher rankings.

3. Link to similar YouTube channels

Spend some time using YouTube as a search engine.

Look for YouTube channels with videos on subjects your patients will be interested in. You’ll get ideas for future videos and can subscribe to these channels for updates when new videos are posted.

If you need ideas for what to post on your practice blog or your Facebook page, try posting a simple link to one of these videos and make some comments about it. Agree, disagree, or use it as a springboard to educate your patients on another related topic. You can do this even if you haven’t made any videos yourself.

4. Link to your other social media accounts

It’s easy to connect your YouTube channel videos to your Facebook account, Twitter account, and other social media sites.

For example, if you follow a few dozen colleagues or peers within your specialty on Twitter (which I highly recommend), you can share your posted videos with them automatically by linking YouTube and Twitter together.

Every time you create a video, a Tweet is automatically posted, announcing your video’s existence. Your video then reaches hundreds or thousands of peers and/or potential patients if your colleagues share your video with their followers.

5. Tell your viewers what you want them to do

In advertising, this is called a “call to action,” or CTA. Never create a video without a message at the end telling your viewer what action to take.
This could be as simple as, “For more information about topic X, visit our website at…”

For a more sophisticated technique, you can tell potential patients to download a free guide on a clinical topic on a certain website. If you have this set up correctly, you can follow up with them over e-mail with even more detailed information.

6. Track your results

YouTube offers free tracking and analytics features built right into your account.
Statistics like viewers per month, number of subscribers to your channel, and where viewers looked at your videos (desktop versus mobile), are calculated for you.

It’s important to track visitor traffic on your website as well. If your most complete educational information is on your own practice website, you’ll want to get people to visit the site after they watch your video.

Google Analytics is a free product that tracks visitors to your website, and can tell you how many visitors came to your website from a site like YouTube.

Use this information to guide future video and article creation.

Since my most popular video is on ganglion cysts, I should probably create more web pages and videos on similar subjects. I wouldn’t know this without the data Google provides.

The best place to get started today

In a previous article I gave you some suggestions for easy video creation methods for your practice.

To start getting comfortable with YouTube, set up a free YouTube account and start searching for and subscribing to channels relevant to your clinical interest.

One thing you’ll quickly realize is that most users are creating mediocre videos with marginally good information. Some or most of these videos have poor quality audio, sloppy video, and are too long.

I found it inspiring to snoop around looking at videos in my specialty. It gave me confidence that I could create some quality educational information without much effort.

Find out more about C. Noel Henley and read more articles at PhysiciansPractice.com.

By Carol Stryker: What if your current staff could actually get all of their work done, you could see 30 percent more patients, or you could get home in time for dinner? How happy would patients be if wait time decreased?

The rule of thumb is that 30 percent of the activity in any type of office is wasted. My experience is that the percentage is even higher in a medical office. The more useless labor you can eliminate, the bigger the increase in productivity and the fewer mistakes. A careful review of some or all of the processes in a medical office can generally be expected to yield productivity gains of at least 30 percent in the areas addressed.

All work, productive and non-productive, is part of a process. Identifying and eliminating the wasted work in a particular process is a project with specific steps. Staff, even those not directly involved in the process, must be included in the project. Their knowledge of what is really happening is invaluable, and their buy-in promotes sustained change.

1. Choose a process you would like to streamline. You will be more motivated to attack a process that is causing major problems, but it might be helpful to practice technique on something simpler.

2. Answer this question: What should the process accomplish and why is that important? Take the time to clearly state the purpose and value of the process and write it down. This is the yardstick for future evaluations. This is the only aspect of the project that the physician(s) cannot delegate or outsource.

3. Write down the steps in the process, in order. Leave some space between the steps. Once you think you have all the steps, walk through them to be certain you have not left anything out. Add what you left out and walk through again. Repeat until all steps have been captured. An individual, with subsequent review and refinement by a knowledgeable group, can create the initial outline of the process.

4. For each step, ask the group:
• What does this have to do with the goal? If nothing, eliminate it. If not much, eliminate it or combine it with another step.
• Is another step performing the same function? If so, which one produces the best outcome? Eliminate the less effective step.
• Is there a better way? Do you have a tool, not available when the process was first developed, that gets the job done more effectively and/or efficiently?
• Could a step be added that would have a positive impact on a subsequent step? Would it help to sort a previously unsorted list? Would a paper report be easier to work than one on a screen?

5. For the amended process, ask:
• Are any additional steps necessary? If something will be printed now that was not printed before, what will be done with the paper?
• Are the steps in the most logical order? Examine alternative sequencing as a possible improvement to the process.
• Is the process intuitive? Will it be easy for the person doing the work to remember?
• Are any steps error-prone? What can be done to minimize or eliminate the propensity to error? If it cannot be eliminated, what can be done to validate the step was done properly?

Repeat from Step 5 until satisfied with the proposed process.

6. Once the improved process is implemented, choose another process and repeat the analysis. Continue until satisfied (even delighted) with the way the office works.

The only difficulty is finding the time and discipline to perform an analysis of a process and implement improvements.

Each successful project frees up resources and makes it easier to address another process. Morale improves because office operations are improving. Stress decreases because there is actually time to do what needs to be done. Staff turnover goes down and profits go up. Give it a try.

Read more articles at Physicianspractice.com.

Carol Stryker helps busy physicians and their practices increase profits, improve patient satisfaction, and mitigate risk by focusing on how work gets done. More than 20 years of responsibility for aggressive operational improvements has produced a strong preference for effective solutions, implemented quickly. Her long history of successfully designing, selecting and implementing complex software systems and managing vendors is especially helpful as clients move to EHRs.

By Craig Koniver, MD:  Why is a trip to the doctor’s office more like going to the DMV than going to Disney World? Both the DMV and Disney World involve waiting in long lines, but Disney has made the entire experience fun and exciting, while the DMV has made it cold and frustrating.

“But medicine is different,” you may say. Seeing the doctor was never meant to be a fun or exciting experience, after all. When you’re sick, you go to the doctor to get well — no more, no less.

This type of thinking, though, is what clearly separates businesses that thrive during rocky economic times (such as Disney, Starbucks, and Apple) and those that do not. The “user” experience, you may say, should not matter in medicine where the idea of getting well is based upon the medicine and not the connection between doctor and patient.

Last week, I visited the DMV. I waited for over three hours there. Three hours! The place was miserable and everyone waiting was stressed and eager to get the heck out of there.

Is this what your waiting room looks like? Probably not yet; but likely in the future.

We need to be honest with ourselves here and note that medicine and healthcare are moving in a direction that promotes more of my experience at the DMV than a room that is quiet and relaxed with smiling people.

Are you smiling these days? Most days? Most of the doctors that I talk to are not. They are fed up with the administrative burden, the declining reimbursements and the overall increase in pressure to see a lot of patients every single day.

I am not a pessimist, but I can appreciate reality. And to me my experience in the DMV last week confirms what I know to be headed our way: longer waits, more frustrated patients, and more administrative hassles

I think it is time you started being honest with yourself about your profession and your daily choices in your practice. I guarantee if you were in any other industry, you would not allow yourself to be as little in charge as you do in medicine.

Here are three brutally honest questions I want you to ponder:

1. On a daily basis, are you practicing medicine the way you truly want to be? If not, why not and what are you going to do about it?

2. If you could change (and you can) one aspect of your career, what would it be? Would you make more money? Would you have more time off? Would you have less staff? Would you still be in medicine?

3. Why do you allow “the system” to dictate to you the terms by which you make money, provide for yourself and your family, and tell you “how to” practice your trade?

I know these are not necessarily easy questions to answer. But it is long overdue that you took a very hard and truthful look at your career and decide for you what is best.

Certainly many of you will ignore this process or brush it off that all is well. But I have a sense that either my recent visit to the DMV or your next one will stay with you for a while. Not because you fear the future, but because you know that on many levels, it is already here.

Read more articles a PhysiciansPractice.com.

The concept of cash-only practices is appealing to many physicians — more time with each patient, fewer administrative issues, no dependence on insurers. But not every practice can make this arrangement work successfully.

If you’re considering a cash-only practice, first examine these factors to see whether such a model is right for you.

1. Demographics

Does your area have the right kind of patients to support a cash-only practice? To find out, you need to know the population density; the number of competing local doctors; and the number of potential patients who lack health insurance, are under-insured, or are unemployed.

You should also know how many local companies offer their employees a combination of health savings accounts and catastrophic insurance, rather than policies with first-dollar coverage — in short, patients who have no choice but to pay cash.

Kathryn Moghadas, RN, CHBC, principal of Associated Healthcare Advisors, Winter Springs, Florida, notes that municipal Websites are good sources of demographic data about your region, as are local realtors and physician marketing groups. To assess the competition, she also recommends the Little Blue Book, which covers 147 metro area directories of physicians and other healthcare providers, including their specialties, primary office locations, and health plan acceptance. Physician organizations, such as the American Academy of Family Physicians, can be troves of useful information on doctors in your area and on cash-only models as well.

2. Rates

Nonconcierge cash-only practices strive to charge affordable, fair rates, but “affordable” and “fair” are subjective. Once you stop taking insurance, you can charge whatever you please.

However, it is easy to determine what the market will bear. Cash-only practices are generally committed to price transparency. Search the Internet for their Websites, where their rates are commonly posted. Comparing several sets of rates in your area or a similar area should give you a sense of what to charge locally.

Both SimpleCare , a national organization that matches patients with cash-only local doctors, and Forrest Direct Pay, which helps physicians set up cash-only practices, offer guidance on rates and suggestions for “coding” in the absence of Current Procedural Terminology codes, which you will no longer need. In both cases, however, you will need to pay a membership fee to get details.

For example, here is what SimpleCare advises prospective physician members: “You establish the SimpleCare price that is fair for you and your patients. By eliminating administrative costs associated with activities such as billing, producing insurance claim forms, coding diagnoses and procedures, referrals, authorizations, payment delays, EOB reviews, claim denials, re-submissions, collection risks, and other ‘managed care’ costs, you provide patients a fair price for services without the administrative hassles and bureaucracy. Many physicians reduce their standard billed charges 30% to 50% for SimpleCare patients and benefit financially, but your SimpleCare price is your decision.”

3. Medicare and Medicaid Patients

If you want to treat patients who have Medicare or Medicaid, you will need to contact the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and opt out of either or both programs for 2 years, after which you will need to formally opt out again. You cannot treat either type of patient selectively. If you see one Medicare patient on a cash-only basis, you must see all on the same basis.

You will also need to draw up a contract between you and the patient clearly stating that you are not a Medicare or Medicaid provider, and that patients who elect to pay you in cash at your going rate will not be able to seek reimbursement from CMS. Both SimpleCare and Forrest Direct Pay can provide you with sample contracts.

But why would Medicare patients opt to pay cash? “Our rates represent about an 85% saving over an insurance-based practice,” Forrest explains, who estimates that 15% of his panel is Medicare patients. “The typical Medicare patient has a 20% copay. So he or she can save about 5% by coming here, paying cash, and not using Medicare.

“This is what fascinates a lot of politicians. I didn’t send any bills to Medicare in 10 years — ever. If we accepted insurance, we could probably send Medicare $800,000 in bills per year. If more doctors start to accept only cash, it will save Medicare a ton of money.”

Forrest didn’t even realize that he had any Medicaid patients until he went to a local pharmacy and asked to see insurance data on his patients. He was shocked at what he learned. “I was seeing 3 times as many Medicaid patients as local doctors who took Medicaid!” he discovered. “I asked these patients: ‘Why are you coming here you could go across the street to a community health center and be seen for free?’”

They said, “Dr. Forrest, when we go to a practice like that, we wait for an hour and they only see us for 5 minutes. We feel like we get the worst care on the planet. We can pay you $25 a month and come here and get the best care on the planet.’ I’m not going to turn those people away. If they want to come here and pay $25 a month, that’s great.”

Consider Your Situation Carefully

4. Quality of Life, Quality of Care

The Forrest Direct Pay Website features a practice transition calculator, similar to retirement savings calculators on financial Websites. This interactive Web application lets you design your practice’s optimal business model.

Plug in your variables for desired quality of life (eg, how many hours you want to work per day, how many days you want to work per week, and how many weeks of vacation you want per year) and your desired quality of care (eg, how many patients you ideally want to see per day, desired mix of scheduled/continuity and walk-in/acute care patients, and how much time you want to spend with each scheduled patient), among other factors, and the calculator predicts how your direct-pay practice will perform financially and how long your transition will take. To access the calculator, you will need to purchase a membership for $79 per month.

5. Personality and Salesmanship Skills

Perhaps the most underrated factor in the success in a cash-only practice is the personality of the doctor.

“The biggest fear for doctors is that they have to be relatively good,” reflects Vern S. Cherewatenko, MD, who founded SimpleCare. “A doctor can’t have a horrible bedside manner and not give good care. Patients won’t come back. I tell prospective SimpleCare doctors, ‘You should only join if you’re a good doctor. If you’re just run of the mill, status quo, and don’t really care about your patients, you probably shouldn’t.”

“You not only need to be personable,” Moghadas says. “You need to be a seller: someone who’s in the market to sell his services.” Most doctors, in her experience, lack these skills because they never needed to develop them. “Maybe you went to Harvard or Johns Hopkins,” she says. “But if you’re dry as toast, you won’t attract and keep patients.”

6. Marketing

Doctors who are employees in a group practice generally have little or no experience with marketing the practice, Moghadas observes. For a direct-pay practice to succeed, effective marketing is essential — and it can be daunting.

You need a good Website. It needs search engine optimization so that Web surfers in your area who are potential patients can find you online. You need to advertise. You need to attract local media coverage. You need signage. And you need to establish relationships with local employers and schools.

“You need to know what you’re selling,” Moghadas says. “Are you selling ease? Convenience? Accuracy? Doctors often think, ‘I’m a great doctor. I’ll just open my door and patients will come. That’s not the way it works.”

7. Going Cold Turkey

Once you make the decision to switch from an insurance-based to a cash-only practice, should you do it in one fell swoop?

“In most cases, we recommend against putting all one’s eggs in a single basket,” says Jeffrey J. Denning, a principal of the Practice Performance Group in La Jolla, California. “We advocate withdrawal from discounted plan participation 1 or 2 plans at a time, starting with the lowest-paying or low-volume payers, while you test the willingness of patients to continue on an out-of-plan basis.”

8. Getting Expert Help

“Always use a practice management consultant,” Moghadas says. “You want an expert to vet the viability of a move of this magnitude in your area. A consultant will help you determine whether this is something you really want to do.”

A consultant will analyze your prospects for success locally; advise you on how to set up a cash-only business; help you establish a marketing program; and perform the education necessary for both you and your staff, which needs to be a lot more customer-friendly than many practices are used to, to successfully transition from an insurance-based to a direct-pay model.

Read more articles at Medscape.com.

Like many other businesses, medical practices often replace or order new computer and electronic equipment at year end to generate additional expenses and deductions and to maximize efficiency going into the new year. You doubtless put a lot of thought and research into what you bought, or at least picked an expert to make those choices for you but how you dispose of the old equipment is just as vital a choice for your practice.

Unless you are part of a hospital or very large practice with dedicated IT officers you likely now need to safely and securely dispose of a variety of computers and related electronic devices including:

• Networked printers, faxes, scanners, etc.
• Computer servers and arrays
• Devices that combines hardware and software for a specific function, medical or administrative
• Networking equipment
• Electronic data storage devices and backups
• Desktop and laptop computers and smartphones that have been used to access or relay protected data

You’ve likely noticed that “computers” themselves were listed last, primarily because they pose the most obvious threat to the sensitive and legally onerous financial and HIPAA-protected information that virtually every medical office in the United States stores and is legally responsible for. However, the admittedly partial list of other devices that can store and transfer this data shows how much wider the exposure is and why all practices must deal with this exposure of patient data in a systematic way. As an example of just how serious the exposure can be, a simple printer can have tens of thousands of patient social security numbers and intake forms stored in its memory.

You may be asking, “Can’t we just give them or throw them away?”

No, not in most cases. You can certainly donate (and in some cases take a tax deduction for) certain peripherals after determining if they pose a storage risk or not, (things like mice, keyboards, and monitors are the most basic examples), but the computers themselves and most other devices that transfer, copy, or store data present a serious exposure to your business. Whether your computers are going to be destroyed, donated, or recycled, it’s vital that all data on the computer is wiped out as a minimal first step.

Downloadable software programs or those available at most office stores can be a first step and may already be present in your operating system or anti-virus programs. Remember that data on personal computers is not actually “erased” unless the hard drive itself is destroyed. In many cases a professional ID thief (or an average 12-year-old) will be able to retrieve the info from a wiped computer.

Here’s a simple five step outline to get you started. These steps will help mitigate your practice’s legal and financial exposures for the data, potentially facilitate the use of the equipment by a worthy charity or individual and help your practice be more green.

1. Take action now. It’s too easy to put the old equipment into a storage area that no one pays attention to or takes inventory on until something goes missing.

2. Have a plan and make someone specific responsible. Create a written chain of custody and educate the person in charge about the risks and gravity of the task at hand.

3. Keep records of how many devices you have and are destroying or donating (make a copy for the CPA including depreciated value and replacement cost) and where they went or how they were disposed of.

4. Disconnect old machines, sign all users out of them and disconnect them from your network where they are often not maintained or updated and where they may actually create a security risk.

5. Keep the equipment secured until it’s ready to be recycled or destroyed. Keep records of where it goes.

Find out more about Ike Devji and our other Practice Notes bloggers.
Read more articles at PhysiciansPractice.com.

As office managers repeatedly tell us, everyone now knows it is illegal to call patients at work about their past-due accounts, and it is harassment to call them at night or on the weekends, too. So the best thing to do is to keep sending the collection letters and statements with colored stickers on them.

Funny thing about conventional wisdom: It is often wrong.

For some tough collection professionals, getting money out of deadbeats beats teeing off with a Callaway 4 wood for entertainment value, but most medical office workers regard the task as one to be avoided. And the result is a bloated accounts receivable.

Here are some of the common collection myths we hear in our consulting and workshop travels. If your collection results are not what they should be, some of this misguided thinking might be the cause.

Myth 1: Legal Restrictions Make Follow-up Risky

Our opening myths about harassing patients at home and at work are a good place to start. It is true that most states have a fair debt collection practices law that governs what is acceptable and what is not. It is also true that this law usually applies to folks in the business of debt collections, not medical practices.

Putting that aside, the laws are not really that restrictive. Things like calling people in the middle of the night to scream obscenities at them or sending goons to their homes or offices are not usually the kinds of things physicians want their employees doing anyway. Most state laws prohibit unreasonably harassing debtors, but we have never actually encountered that in more than 30 years of practice management consulting.

Telephoning people at work or at home is not harassment until they tell you to quit, and maybe not even then if you are reasonable about it. Of course, if personal calls will jeopardize their jobs, that will not help you collect your fees. And it certainly isn’t your goal to make your patients lose their jobs. So listen carefully when talking to patients at work, and don’t tell anyone else there the reason for the call or imply that it is a medical issue you’re calling about, either.

Another legal risk frequently raised is the notion that there is a malpractice risk associated with collection follow-up. We have never actually heard a lawyer say doctors should not pursue just debts because the patient might retaliate, but that is what physicians and office managers say they hear.

Our advice: Put yourself ahead of your malpractice carrier when deciding what is best for your practice. If there was a poor medical result, tread cautiously about collecting your fee — writing it off is probably the prudent (and also the right) thing to do. But if not, don’t submit to extortion, especially that self-imposed by fear of a lawsuit.

Beliefs That Impair Collection Efforts

Myth 2: “There’s No Time for Collection Work”

A common argument is: “Because of the extra clerical work imposed by insurers, we have no time to pursue delinquent accounts.”

As with most myths, there is partial truth here. Lots of offices use this as a convenient excuse for avoiding follow-up, but you can usually find some other work to be sacrificed, leaving time for collecting.

The managed care problem only means that collecting unpaid balances is all the more crucial. Because of contract discounting, collecting the amounts owed by patients (and slow-pay insurers) could mean the difference between staff raises and benefit cutbacks. Sometimes, physicians feed the problem, trying to do today’s office work with staff levels of the 1980s. It just does not work.

Myth 3: You Cannot Sue to Collect if They Are Making Payments

Whether you should take a patient to small claims court or pass the account to a collection attorney will depend on the amount outstanding and the debtor’s likely ability to pay, but it is rare that you will lose a collection suit.

So don’t let staff members tell you that you cannot sue for immediate payment because the patient is making an effort to pay, no matter how feeble that effort may be. Unless you have agreed in writing to the payment schedule, you are not obligated to accept the patient’s unilaterally imposed schedule. If you decide to give the patient some leeway, that is your decision, but be aware of what you are doing.

Myth 4: Collection Letters Are Cheaper Than Telephone Calls

The issue with collection efforts should be cost-effectiveness, not just cost. A printed notice in color on a statement is probably the easiest and cheapest way to communicate with patients about past-due balances, and it works for some of them. But lots of practices use only this method, or add a series of form letters, because they think phone calls create too much payroll cost.

For lots of problem accounts, however, the notes and letters are as easy to ignore as the statements that preceded them. When a technique isn’t working, the only sane thing to do is to try something different. Collection calls are harder to ignore than the mail.

Myth 5: You Cannot Reach Patients at Home

Calling patients at home might work better. Good collectors try every phone number they can find. But in some offices we hear that “we don’t call patients at home because ‘they’re rarely there.’ ” Have you tried the dinner hour? Saturday morning?

It is true that many people now have caller ID, and simply won’t answer if they see your phone number. After you have called 3 times with no answer, start leaving messages, and ask the patient to call you back to discuss his or her payments. Chances are, they won’t call, but they are likely to want to avoid getting further messages, and that may prompt them to take care of the problem.

Getting Payment Due Is Not Always Easy

Myth 6: You Can’t Get Blood From a Stone

This cliché, as used in medical practices, means that “patients can’t afford our fees. Were it not for insurance, we wouldn’t be paid at all.” This is often nonsense, of course, but it is surprising how many physicians have fallen into this reasoning, along with their employees. In fact, lots of healthcare is not impossibly expensive. In today’s economy, with many people out of work, it is harder for some families to pay for healthcare, but if you are going to give them leeway about payment, make sure their situation is real and not just a “dog ate the homework” situation.

This myth is often just an excuse to justify a half-baked collection effort. Many patients have income and borrowing power to pay for all sorts of other stuff — cars, cruises, recreational drugs — and they can pay you, too.

Myth 7: Thirty Is a Magical Number

Lots of practices work on a 30-day billing cycle. They look at delinquent accounts, at most, once a month, when printed out on the statements on the aged trial balance listing. But patients usually get paid more often than that.

Your staff should work off a calendar or tickler file, not the accounts receivable printout. If a patient swears he will send a check next Friday, why wait until a month from now to see whether he did? Collecting is a daily activity when managed this way, and that’s good, because it is less overwhelming when the job is carved into 20 daily bites each month.

Myth 8: When You Mail Statements Makes a Difference

We have heard all kinds of superstitions about when to mail the bills. “Statements should be timed to arrive on the first or last day of the month,” or “Mail early in the week to avoid delivery on Mondays (the biggest mail day),” and so on.

At our house, bills arrive every day. The most important thing is to send statements consistently. If sending a quarter of them each Wednesday in a 4-week cycle makes life easier in your office, we recommend it. The incoming phone calls from patients will be smoother throughout the month, too.

You can never tell when patients get paid. Another benefit to a 4-week cycle: You will accelerate your collections by about 8%, as you will be sending statements 13 times a year instead of 12.

Myth 9: Sending Patients to a Collecting Agency Breeds Bad PR

The assumption is that by pressing your claim against the patient, he will tell all his friends you are a weasel. Maybe some do. But most deadbeats do not brag about it, and if their friends are anything like them, you are probably better off without them as patients.

Instead, when the collection process is polite and reasonable, but firm, it may actually engender more respect for the doctor on the part of the patient. No one will value the services you provide more than you do yourself.

Read more articles at Medscape.com.

What differentiates you from everyone else who has the same credentials?

How many physicians’ practices are going to say they have no idea? Many practices have board certified and/or board eligible physicians on staff. Many follow the rules and “best practices” they learned in medical school. Many are competent physicians. So what does differentiate you?

The next question: Why do you care? You are a competent physician who receives referrals from other physicians and the hospital, what can possibly make you interested in knowing what about your practice is different? Let’s take it from another angle. You receive referrals from other physicians. Why? Is it because you do something extra or is it because they have to give out a list of at least three physicians in your specialty? You receive referrals from the hospital. Why? For the same reasons as the other doctors?

And from another angle, why do you give referrals? Because a practice is nearby? The physician gives something special to the patient experience? They are the only specialist in your area with that specialty expertise? These are questions you really need to have a handle on. And, if there is nothing that differentiates you then I see a very dim future for your practice.

Let’s say you decide you want to join other physicians in a group; or conversely you want other physicians to join you. Why would they want you to join them or vice versa? Let’s go to the next step and you decide you want to sell your practice; either because you are retiring or you want a hospital to deal with all those things you don’t want to have to handle. Why would they want to pay top dollar for a practice that is the “norm”? Would you want to pay top dollar for anything that is average? I don’t think so.

So, what can you do or be that differentiates you from the pack? The following are a couple of suggestions that you have probably heard before; either from me or other bloggers, patients, etc.

1. Be a huge proponent of the Golden Rule.
2. Use technology to make your life easier as well as for your staff and patients.
3. Have hours that actually mean something to a working person.
4. When running late, let a patient know and help to reschedule
5. Use the Internet for contacting those patients who are comfortable with that form of communication.
6. Have front desk staff that actually care and portray that each day to each patient.
7. Teach your staff good customer service.
8. Use current information and don’t rely on what you learned just in medical school.
9. Work with people.
10. Have knowledge or a skill no one else does.

These are just some of the things you can do to differentiate yourself with your patients. If you have happy patients, they tell others 20 percent of the time. If they are upset, they tell others 80 percent of the time. Word-of-mouth on the street is either working for or against you. There is no in-between.

I then believe you need to have the same type of attitude with other physicians as well as with the hospitals in the area. The more you work with them, the better your reputation and the more they will work with you.

All of this work to differentiate yourself and your practice is worth money. It is either going to garner you more patients and let you remain independent, if that is your goal. Or, it will garner you interest from parties who might just be willing to pay top dollar for your practice or they may want to jump on board with you. It gives you options!

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